The Download and Documentation as always is displayed and well laid out on Labs:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

Looks like its a pretty intensive install for Windows, but Mac looks fine

Adobe is providing some example libraries, and developers are encouraged to share their ported libraries.

On another note one thing mentioned in the 2nd Keynote spiked my interest:

“Ben then opens up Visual Studio and edits MXML with color coding in Visual Studio using a new plugin Adobe is creating. Next he shows a native AMF to .net implementation to build a back-end in C#.”

Hmmm to tell you the truth if the plugin for Visual Studio works well, I might end up doing my flex work in that. I never use the visual layout features of Flex Builder these days and Thermo….  I mean Catalyst will do that work for me.

2 weeks later I am versed enough at the principals of Objective C to start causing trouble. I must admit its a very different syntax. The first thing I found laborious was xml and http handling. I was accessing web services on my web server just mucking around an it was so painful. Having come from the wonderfull worlds of Flex Remoting coupled with .NET through WebOrb I started thinking there must be a better way.

Guess what there is!

After running round and learning a few new things I was exposing methods in my .NET dlls to the Iphone using common Objects through a service. All Binary too Sound familiar? Well it should, its what Flex remoting is. I couldn’t use AMF though as I couldn’t find an AMF sterilizer in Objective C and definitely wasn’t wanting to write one with my work load at the moment.

What I did find for now was Hessian, which covers a range of languages. After a setting up unit tests, I was passing native objects from each Language to the other (Iphone Objective C to .NET C#) in my unit tests and got all basic and complex types working along with custom classes etc. So now its off to build an app with this in hand. 

Depending on how your objects are structured you can see a huge compression of the objects compared to markup (XML) alternatives. I was seeing 100kb xml to 9kb hessian protocol. Definitely something to look at with New Zealand’s 3G Data prices. And to top it off its less code than parsing xml, faster to develop and faster to use. Give me a yell if you want more info as it can be easily transported to ROR, Java etc.

Now if only Apple would hurry up and allow me onto the Iphone Developer program! its been two weeks!!!

Wouldn’t it be lovely to have the data pushes and streaming of Flash remoting on the Iphone. Stay tuned!

FREE as in beer!!

Yep what used to cost 10k is now absolutely free. Mark Pillar from The Midnight Coders has made this latest version of WebOrb free, and there are a few special surprises in this latest version I managed to drag out of Mark.

If your currently using it please check your versions numbers as version 4.3.0.2 is about 400% faster.
What used to take 26 seconds now takes only 300 milliseconds. Mark will be publishing a bench testing application in the next few days to profile the performance.

For more indepth details about this head over to the WebOrb blog and check it out.

Cheers Mark for such a nice gift to the community.

I have heard/read several rumors around the web that apple was going to annouce something similar at the apple developers conference next month- time will tell with that one.

It all seems to have stemmed from that original video that did the rounds a year or so ago, showing Jeff Han's research. [YOU TUBE Video HERE]  

Over on Ryan's post where I originally read this are some links to more information, but it leaves me wondering about the price. 50inch plasma/lcd that has touch screen? I would cringe everytime someone put any liquid near it. I would love a big coffee table that can sync my phone, make pretty displays to set the mood even sell me more stuff I dont need, but I would also love to see it intergrate some RFD technology that would allow objects to interact. Im not sure how Microsoft has the display registering that a camera has been placed on the display so maybe they already have that in there.

What the F*$k you say. .NET and ROR, what an unlikely couple. Well yeah. ROR rocks at making sites quick and clean. .NET is the most rocking serverside lanuage with system intergration. It should be its writen by the same company that makes the OS. So I was after a way to get the best of both worlds.

I really wont bore you with the details here, but if you want any info just leave a comment with your email and I will explain it to you. I would like to write a generic wrapper/plugin for ROR to make this really easy but I have to sort out translation of dataTypes so complex Objects can be passed between the two.

I wrote a little site that called a .NET dll to get system information like CPU % etc to display on a page. To basically show load on the server. 

Ultra g33k stuff I know but still a very cool little tid bit to know can be done. 

Not to mention all the hard work in the back end but check out the front end. They have build a management console in flex of course, which is a central place for documentation and code generation. THATS RIGHT CODE GENERATION!!!

And not just one lanuage. Remember that WebOrb can cover many network protocols including Ajax.

 As well as this there is a central place to view examples:

So even if you just want to know what its al about try downloading and install it (its very easy) and take a look. There are many many more feature included with this new release but too many to talk about in one post. I believe Mark Pillar will be doing some demo videos and tutorials soon.

"Free open-source implementation of Flash Remoting in Ruby."
"Can be deployed into any Rails-enabled application to expose it to Flash Remoting and Flex clients."
"Provides full implementation of Flash Remoting and Flex Data Services (AMF0 and AMF3, Data Management)"

If you head over to http://www.themidnightcoders.com/index.htm  and check it out, they say that the PHP and the ROR version is coming Q3 06 (never really liked that whole quarter thing but I spose it means there isnt a solid date). I cant wait though, seeing how easy and fast ROR is along with AMF and some flex (my goodness I sound like a marketing person lol) I will be making some cool stuff…..quickly.

Best of all the same packages that provide the AMF are specifically designed to intergrate with AJAX calls. So you get the best of all the Web 2.0 terms to sell your client on buying the full version. The have plenty of demoslive on their server. Showing that pretty much the same methods can be accessed via both AMF and ajax calls.

So put this one in your "to keep an eye on" box and hold your breath. 

For those of you keeping an eye on this blog for Flabulator , my flash widget app, yes I am still working on it, but I got quite frustrated with the alpha issue in .Net. Seems I can only really do it in c++ or a linked c++ dll. Not Fun!! Everything works except alpha channels and I havent gotten round to making the external interface library. The library is this weeks task! Anyone really hanging for this application?

So peeps things will keep on keeping on here check back soon!

So I will first off try to reproduce this as a class in .Net and if not I will try hooking into the screenweaver DLL. But this just goes to show how openSource rocks!! Same as always If I get it done Ill release the source of the class. Stay tuned!!